Measures of psycholinguistic and reading abilities of 25 educable mentally handicapped (EMR) good readers and 25 EMR poor readers in the intermediate and junior high school special education classes were compared with one way analyses of covariance, using chronological age, mental age, and IQ as covariates. In comparison, the good reader grouped showed significantly higher abilities in auditory association, auditory reception, grammatic closure, manual expression, visual closure, visual sequential memory, automatic level of organization, representation level of organization, auditory communication, visual communication, and psycholinguistic age; and in average reading, word recognition, oral reading, silent reading, and listening comprehension. Correlational analyses revealed that psycholinguistic age was a more powerful predictor of average reading than mental age and that IQ did not correlate with average reading at all. (Author)